J. A. Zahm

“ But, of all those whose names have come down to us, by far the most noted, accomplished and influential was the famous Aspasia of Miletus. In many respects she was the most remarkable woman Greece ever produced. Of rare talent and culture, of extraordinary tact and finesse, of a fascinating personality combined with the grace and sensibility of her sex, together with a masculine power of intellect, "this gracious Ionian," as has well been said, "stands with Sappho on the pinnacle of Hellenic culture, each in her own field the highest feminine representative of an esthetic race." ”

“ The education of women favors public morals; it provides for every season of life as well as for the brightest and the best; and leaves a woman when she is stricken by the hand of time, not as she now is, destitute of everything and neglected by all, but with the full power and the splendid attractions of knowledge,—diffusing the elegant pleasures of polite literature, and receiving the just homage of learned and accomplished men. ”

“ Living in an age of prodigious mental activity, when women, as well as men, were actuated by an abiding love of knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing surprising in finding a woman like Arete commanding the admiration of her countrymen by her learning and eloquence. For was not the learned and eloquent Aspasia her contemporary? And did not Theano, the wife of Pythagoras, take charge of her husband's school after his death; and does not antiquity credit her with being not only a successful teacher of philosophy, but also a writer of books of recognized value? ”

“ But, notwithstanding all the educational advantages our people have enjoyed and all the encouragement they have received to achieve something of supreme excellence, our great country with its teeming millions attracted from the most gifted nations of the Old World has not yet produced a single man who has attained the highest rank in either literature or art or science. Far from having a preëminent master of song like Homer or Dante, we have not even a poet approaching Goethe or Tasso or Camoens. We have no Cervantes, no Milton, no Racine, no Molière. ”

“ A few years after she had become a member of the university faculty Laura was a European celebrity, and no one eminent by learning or birth passed through Bologna without availing himself of the opportunity of making the acquaintance of so extraordinary a woman. Men of science and letters vied with princes and emperors in doing honor to one who was looked upon by many as being, like Arete of old, endowed with a soul and a genius far above that of ordinary mortals, and as being the possessor of a talent that indicated something superhuman. ”

“ The women in Greece, there can be no doubt about it, were as richly endowed by nature as were the men, and only lacked the opportunities that men enjoyed to achieve, in every sphere of intellectual activity, a corresponding measure of success. They were extraordinary types, these women of ancient Greece; for among them we find the dignified Roman matron, the chatelaine of the Middle Ages, the brilliant woman of the Renaissance and the cultured mistress of the French salon. But all their talent, power and genius counted for naught. ”

“ It is safe to say that no two women were ever engaged in a more important or more difficult literary undertaking—one requiring keener critical sense or more profound learning—than were Paula and Eustochium, or one in which their efforts were crowned with more brilliant success than were those of these two supreme exemplars of the grace, the knowledge, the culture, the refinement of Roman womanhood—the crowning glories of womanhood throughout the ages. ”

“ For nothing gives falser views of nature as a whole, nothing more unfits the mind for a proper apprehension of higher and more important truths, nothing more incapacitates one for the enjoyment of the masterpieces of literature or the sweeter amenities of life, than the narrow occupation of a specialist who sees nothing in the universe but electrons, microbes and protozoa.
But just at the critical moment, when men of science would rather discover a process than a law, when they are so preoccupied with the infinitely little that they lose sight of the cosmos as a whole ”

“ The age-old prejudice against women who devote themselves to the study of science, or who contribute to the progress of knowledge, was still as dominant as it was in the days of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a century and a half before. Mme. Curie, like her famous sister in Italy, might win the plaudits of the world for her achievements; but she could have no recognition from the one institution, above all others, that was specially founded to foster the development of science and literature, and to crown the efforts of those who had proven themselves worthy of the Academy's highest honor. ”

“ It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing. As for myself, all my life I have been unable to decide for which I had the greater inclination, mathematics or literature. As soon as my brain grows wearied of purely abstract speculations it immediately begins to incline to observations on life, to narrative, and vice versa, everything in life begins to appear insignificant and uninteresting, and only the eternal, immutable laws of science attract me. ”

“ We have yet to learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli equally potent.
But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven. We know that France—so long the reputed center of culture—has so far produced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo. ”

“ Here, more than in Salerno, more than in any other city in the world, was, for long centuries, witnessed a blooming of female genius that has, since the time of Gratian and Irnerius, given the University of Bologna preëminence in the estimation of all friends of woman's education and woman's culture. For here, within the walls of what was for centuries the most celebrated university in Christendom, women had, for the first time, an opportunity of devoting themselves at will to the study of any and all branches of knowledge. ”

“ But the ideal center of intellectual culture was the court of Urbino, the central figure of which was the learned and accomplished Elizabetta Gonzaga. This picturesque city of the eastern slope of the Apennines was then to Italy what Athens had been to Greece in the days of Pericles; and Elizabetta was to its court what Aspasia was in her own matchless salon—the magnet which attracted all the artists and men of letters of the age. ”

“ And had they elected to devote all their time to scientific research, instead of giving the greater part of it to those to whom they were so devotedly attached, who can tell how much more brilliant would have been their achievements and how much greater would have been the fame they would have won for themselves. Both of them were dowered in an eminent degree with taste and talent for science, and had they chosen to make it the sole object of their life work, there can be no doubt that their personal contributions to natural history and astronomy would have been far greater than they were. ”

“ Never in the history of the world were there in any one city so many eminent men—poets, orators, statesmen, painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers—as in Athens, and yet not a single native-born Athenian woman ever attained the least distinction in any department of art or science or literature. We cannot conceive for a moment that Greece's fertility in great men and barrenness in great women was due to the fact that the mothers of such illustrious men were ordinary housewives [Pg 17] and entirely devoid of the talent and genius which gave immortality to their distinguished sons. ”

“ And Juvenal had no more love for educated women than have some of our contemporaries for a blue-stocking housekeeper. He gives his opinion of them in the following characteristic fashion:
"That woman is a worse nuisance than usual who, as soon as she reclines on her couch, praises Virgil; makes excuses for doomed Dido; pits bards against one another and compares them, and weighs Homer and Mars in the balance. Teachers of literature give way, professors are vanquished, the whole mob is hushed, and so great is the torrent of words that no lawyer or auctioneer may speak, nor any other woman." ”

“ It is safe to say that no one ever put her knowledge of chemical science to more practical use or made it more perfectly subserve the public weal than did Mrs. Richards. To spread among the masses a knowledge of the principles of sanitation, to make them realize how indispensable to health are pure food, pure water, pure air and life-giving sunshine was her great mission in life, and in this she displayed an energy and a tireless zeal which were an inspiration to all with whom she came into contact. ”

“ This is observable in all the sciences, but especially in such all-embracing sciences as chemistry, biology, and archæology. A man now does well if he master a single branch of any of these sciences, and is hailed as exceptionally fortunate if he succeed in making some notable discovery in his limited field of research. So great, indeed, has been the activity of scientific men in every department of science during the last half century, and so thoroughly have they explored the most hidden recesses of nature, that it, at times, seems as if there were but little left to discover. ”

“ It is useless to cite instances of women who have attained eminence in astronomy, mathematics, archæology, or in any other science whatever. Such instances, we are assured, are only exceptions and prove nothing. Men like Lombroso are willing to admit the existence of an occasional woman of talent, but they deny the existence of genius in one who is truly a womanly woman. [90] For, with Goncourt, they flippantly assert, Il n'y a pas de femmes de génie: lorsqu'elles sont des génies, elles sont des hommes—there are no women of genius; when they have genius they are men. ”

“ While wandering through the famed and picturesque land of the Hellenes, rejoicing in the countless beauties of the islands of the Ionian and Ægean seas or scaling the heights of Helicon and Parnassus, all so redolent of the storied past, I saw on every side tangible evidence of that marvelous race of men and women whose matchless achievements have been the delight and inspiration of the world for nearly three thousand years. ”

“ She has proved her ability in the Honors Tripos of every branch; she has beaten the senior wrangler in mathematics; she has taken a 'first-class' in classics, in history, in science, in languages. She has proved, not that she is a man's equal in intellect, though she claims so much, because she has not yet advanced any branch of learning, of science, one single step, but she has proved her capacity to take her place beside the young men who are the flower of their generation—the young men who stand in the first class of honors when they take their degree.... ”

“ That which most impresses the student of education during this period of Italian history is not the splendor of art and letters in court and castle, which so dazzled Europe during the time of Renée of Ferrara and Elizabetta Gonzaga of Urbino. We find, it is true, a goodly number of women who won distinction as poets and artists; but it is rather those who were devoted to more serious studies that arrest our attention—women who attained eminence in physical and natural science, in mathematics, in the classical and oriental languages, in philosophy, law and theology. ”

“ She knows a few words of French, which she produces at frequent intervals; as to history, geography, science, the condition of the people, her mind is an entire blank; she knows nothing of these things. Her conversation is commonplace, as her ideas are limited; she can not reason on any subject whatever because of her ignorance; or, as she herself would say, because she is a woman. In her presence, and indeed in the presence of ladies generally, men talk trivialities. There was indeed a general belief that women were creatures incapable of argument, or of reason, or of connected thought. ”

“ We know that Athens, which during the most brilliant period of its history counted only fifty-four hundred free-born citizens—less than the population of a small modern town—was able to produce within a very brief epoch more men of supreme distinction than all the rest of Europe from the Age of Pericles until the dawn of the Renaissance. Hers is still the art of the world, the literature of the world, the philosophy of the world, the culture of the world. ”